'We know almost nothing about the person who owned this ingenious knife, but perhaps he was one of those who profited from the vast expansion of Rome - he would have been wealthy to have such a real luxury item.
'Perhaps he was a traveller, who required a practical compound utensil like this on his journeys.'
Or perhaps he was a desperate knife seller, traveling from city to city trying to offload this ungodly expensive silver behemoth, where at every city he tried to explain the benefits the crowd would shout 'but I can buy a wooden toothpick for a 1/100 of a copper!', 'I already have a spatula made with olive wood!', 'I already have a bone pick to pull snails out of their shell!'.
The knife seller eventually took his own life by iron blade to the eye.
Ha! I like that idea. But ordinary things have a history of being outlandishly ornamented, usually to show off wealth. People have been buying this crap for millennia. The Amish actually banned buttons(!), not because they want to look funny with hooks and zippers, but because in the 1800's it became a fad to have enormous brass buttons with inlay and ivory and embossed scenes. They rebelled against the pride and wastefulness.
'Perhaps he was a traveller, who required a practical compound utensil like this on his journeys.'
Or perhaps he was a desperate knife seller, traveling from city to city trying to offload this ungodly expensive silver behemoth, where at every city he tried to explain the benefits the crowd would shout 'but I can buy a wooden toothpick for a 1/100 of a copper!', 'I already have a spatula made with olive wood!', 'I already have a bone pick to pull snails out of their shell!'.
The knife seller eventually took his own life by iron blade to the eye.